The 2010s File Feature
Heathens
"Heathens" by Twenty One Pilots, Suicide Squad, Chart Performance, and Genre-Defying Identity "Heathens" by twenty one pilots was released on June 21, 2016, …
01 The Story
"Heathens" by Twenty One Pilots, Suicide Squad, Chart Performance, and Genre-Defying Identity
"Heathens" by twenty one pilots was released on June 21, 2016, as part of the soundtrack for the DC Comics film Suicide Squad. It was distributed through Atlantic Records and Fueled by Ramen, the independent label with which the duo, Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun, had been associated since the earlier stages of their career. The song peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100, the highest chart position the band had achieved at that point in their career and the culmination of what had been a period of rapid commercial ascent that had already produced the number-one single "Stressed Out" earlier the same year.
The song was written entirely by Tyler Joseph and produced by Joseph along with Mike Elizondo. The production combines the genre-fluid approach that had become the duo's trademark, incorporating elements of alternative rock, hip-hop, synth-pop, and piano-driven indie, with a slightly darker, more cinematic aesthetic suited to the Suicide Squad promotional context. The track begins with delicate, sparse piano before expanding into a driving rock arrangement, a structural arc that mirrors the tension-and-release logic of the film trailer and promotional content it was designed to accompany.
Twenty one pilots had built a substantial and intensely loyal fanbase, known as the Skeleton Clique, through years of grassroots touring and an online presence that emphasized personal connection between the artists and their audience. Their major-label breakthrough had come with the album Blurryface in 2015, which debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 and produced several charting singles, including "Stressed Out," "Ride," and "Tear in My Heart." By the time "Heathens" was released, the duo were among the most commercially significant alternative rock acts in the United States.
The song was recorded specifically for the Suicide Squad soundtrack, which was curated by Skrillex and Warner Bros. Records. The soundtrack also featured contributions from Lil Wayne, Wiz Khalifa, Kehlani, Grace, and Action Bronson, among others. "Heathens" was positioned as the lead single from the soundtrack and was used extensively in the film's promotional campaign, appearing in trailers that accumulated hundreds of millions of views online and introducing the song to audiences who might not have previously engaged with twenty one pilots's music.
The film itself was released on August 5, 2016, to mixed critical reception but strong box office performance, grossing over 746 million dollars worldwide. The commercial success of the film amplified the song's reach, and "Heathens" became something of an anthem for the film's promotional campaign even as critical opinion of the film was divided. This disconnect between the song's quality and the film's reception was noted by many reviewers, who praised the track independently of their assessments of Suicide Squad.
The music video, directed by Andrew Donoho and Jason Lester, was set within the world of Suicide Squad and featured footage from the film alongside original performance footage of Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun in prison-themed settings consistent with the film's visual world. The video was designed to function simultaneously as a music promotional piece and as film marketing, a dual function that became increasingly common in the era of tentpole franchise filmmaking. The video accumulated hundreds of millions of views on YouTube, aided by the enormous promotional infrastructure of the Warner Bros. marketing campaign.
Radio performance for "Heathens" was exceptional by alternative rock standards and extraordinary for a soundtrack single. It topped the Alternative Songs chart for eleven weeks, becoming the longest-running number-one on that chart at the time. It also performed strongly on the Adult Top 40 chart and crossed over to pop radio in a way that few alternative rock acts achieve, reflecting both the song's mainstream accessibility and the massive promotional push that accompanied the film's release.
At the Grammy Awards in 2017, the song received a nomination for Best Rock Performance, recognizing both its creative quality and its commercial significance. The nomination came alongside "Stressed Out," which was nominated in the same category, making twenty one pilots one of very few acts to receive multiple nominations in a single rock performance category in the same cycle. At the Billboard Music Awards in 2017, the song was recognized in the Top Rock Song category, among other nominations.
From a historical perspective, "Heathens" is significant as an example of how film soundtracks can serve as commercial breakthrough vehicles for artists who already have strong fanbases but have not yet penetrated mainstream pop markets fully. The song's exposure through the Suicide Squad promotional campaign reached audiences far beyond those who would typically encounter alternative rock, and the quality of the track ensured that many of those new listeners became ongoing fans of the duo's work.
The song also contributed to a broader moment of alternative rock reclaiming chart territory that the genre had largely ceded to pop and hip-hop during the early years of the 2010s streaming era. The simultaneous chart success of twenty one pilots, Imagine Dragons, and other genre-fluid acts in the mid-2010s suggested that there was significant unmet demand for melodically driven, emotionally substantive rock in a mainstream market that had perhaps underestimated that appetite.
02 Song Meaning
The Meaning of "Heathens", Outsiders, Acceptance, and the Psychology of the Marginalized
"Heathens" is a song about belonging and exclusion, about the relationship between mainstream society and those it labels as dangerous, strange, or outside acceptable norms. The title is deliberately chosen: a heathen is not simply someone who does wrong but someone whose entire worldview and identity places them outside the recognized moral community. Twenty one pilots use this framing to explore the experience of people who exist on the social margins, who are misunderstood or feared by those who have never tried to understand them.
The song's central address is simultaneously an introduction and a warning. The narrator is telling someone entering a world populated by people who have been damaged, rejected, or written off by society to tread carefully, not because these people are genuinely dangerous, but because they are volatile in the way that people who have been hurt tend to be. The caution the narrator extends carries a quality of protectiveness more than menace: learn the rules of this world before you judge it.
This framing connects organically with the Suicide Squad narrative context, in which the central characters are supervillains and criminals recruited for a dangerous mission. But the song's meaning extends far beyond the film's plot. Tyler Joseph consistently wrote from the perspective of people who experience mental illness, social anxiety, and the particular loneliness of feeling fundamentally different from the people around them, and "Heathens" continues that thematic tradition with the added resonance of the film's premise as a contextual frame.
The request for patience embedded in the song's thematic content is one of its most emotionally precise elements. The narrator is not asking for approval or validation; he is asking for the time to be understood before being judged. This is a specific and recognizable emotional need, particularly for people whose external presentation or internal struggles make them subjects of fear or suspicion in social contexts they cannot fully control. The song gives that need a voice without sentimentalizing it or making it an appeal for sympathy.
The musical structure reinforces the thematic content in interesting ways. The song begins quietly and tentatively, as if feeling its way into the space before it arrives, and then expands into something considerably more expansive and powerful. This arc mirrors the experience of encountering someone initially perceived as threatening and gradually coming to understand their fuller complexity. The structural argument is that what begins as scary opens into something comprehensible and even moving if you stay long enough to hear it out.
Twenty one pilots had built their entire artistic identity around the experience of being different, of struggling with internal states that mainstream culture either ignored or pathologized. "Heathens" extended that identity into a broader social frame, connecting the individual experience of feeling like an outsider to a collective experience of being grouped with others who have been similarly categorized and dismissed. The Skeleton Clique, the duo's fanbase, had always functioned as a community of people who recognized that experience in themselves, and the song amplified the communal dimension of that recognition.
The warning not to make assumptions about people based on their appearance or reputation carries a moral dimension that gives the song weight beyond its entertainment function. The song is not simply describing a feeling; it is making an argument about how human beings should treat one another, specifically how those who occupy positions of relative social security should approach those who do not. This ethical dimension, delivered without preachiness within a genre and commercial context that typically avoids explicit moral argument, is one of the song's most distinctive features.
In the context of twenty one pilots' larger body of work, "Heathens" represents a moment of thematic consolidation, gathering the themes of mental health, social marginalization, and the desire for genuine understanding that had animated their earlier albums and expressing them within a framework that could reach an audience far beyond their existing fanbase. The song's commercial success meant that its emotional content reached millions of listeners who might never have otherwise encountered music making those particular arguments with that particular combination of vulnerability and confidence.
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